Need New Laptop

Looking to upgrade to a new laptop very soon and need plenty of input and suggestions. I would like to go with a Dell or HP, I have been leaning towards a Dell for about 2 week now.

I'm not a gamer but I want something with plenty of speed and ability to handle windows and multi task quickly. I may watch and record DVD on occasion but this is not the main intent of the purchase. I will be using it for e-mail. web browsing and home office work.

My budget is under $700-800 (I know this is limited but I should be able to get plenty of machine with the right input).

Thanks for your assistance,
Dana

That's plenty o'cash these days. Get at least 4 gb memory and a big 'ol hard drive (maybe 320 gb) and you're set! Windows 7 is great, btw, and will come loaded on your machine.

We recently bought a new laptop at newegg.com - good selection and prices. FWIW, we've got two Acer laptops and have been pleased, good performance, price and no reliability issues (crossing fingers).

Food for thought - Depending on how portable you want it to be.

I like Netbooks. They are not hotrods, but they multitask just fine. And they run office or web apps just fine.
FWIW I have an Eee PC with 2G of ram and a 160G hard drive. I use it with VirtualDJ - I can play an MP3 while I'm queuing up and beat matching another, while running iTunes and Firefox. All at the same time.

And for home use, they have a monitor port and USB. Just hook it up to a standard keyboard and mouse, and your current monitor, and you have a desktop.

It's the best of both worlds for me - Works like a desktop, but I can nearly stick it in a pocket! The 8 hour battery life is just a bonus!

Regardless of what you chose, Many places will let you take one home for 2 weeks (At least Best Buy will). If it sucks for you, you can return it...

I've seen some nice HPs lately. And the better Dells are pretty good, but avoid the cheap ones. A friend just bought a Sony. They are nice, but usually more money. And he still loves his EeePC too. Toshiba used to be a very solid machine, but I've heard of lots of people having poor luck with them lately.

Homercidal said:

Toshiba used to be a very solid machine, but I've heard of lots of people having poor luck with them lately.

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+1 to that. My first laptop was a Toshiba that I had bought almost ten years ago. I loved it and it performed great. I had that thing for just short of 8 years. Never had to replace any parts and I only had to wipe the hard drive once, but that was because I had let too many viruses and whatnot in.

With that in mind, I bought a Toshiba about a year and a half ago and I now wish I hadn't wasted the money. No hardware issues, but the proprietary version of Windows is horrible. I locks up on me a lot, there are a lot of programs that it won't let me get rid of, I've had to wipe the hard drive once already because it wouldn't let me boot up at all, and I don't know how many times I've had to rip my CDs back onto it because somehow the files got corrupted. But its only the CDs, not anything I've downloaded and I've never had this issue with my desktop. But I also bought an HP about 8 months ago for the desktop. Setup was rediculously simple and quick. That thing is great. I have had absolutely zero issues with it at all.

Stay away from Toshiba, and I've heard equally great things about HP laptops and desktops.

Make sure you get a dual core minimum. I think that's pretty common now but just double check. $700 is plenty for music/pictures/dvd capable laptop. You'll be fine.

I just got this one from Sams Club. I love it, windows 7 rules. It also has an hdmi port, so I can plug it into my 65 hi def tv. Cool for watching tv and surfing. At $566, it's reasonably priced. And it's a cool color.


http://www.samsclub.com/sams/shop/product.jsp?productId=prod1100272

I've purchased two laptops from Dell and will never, EVER do business with them again. I would highly recommend buying ANYTHING but a Dell at this point. The laptops had defects and they claimed to not know anything about it. Their financing division has been investigated for fraud. Just not a good company to go with.

I got my last laptop from Best Buy simply because I got a good price on it (sale) and was able to get 12 months same as cash and paid it off so I didn't pay any interest.

Find one you think you like. When you do, try to find reviews on websites like notebookreview.com or notebookcheck.net

When you found one that is good for the price and has some good reviews, go to the store and test it out. Type on it for 10-20 minutes, use the mouse pad, use the function buttons. My brother went and bought the HP-G62 (Core I3 - 499$) and hates the keyboard layout, the mouse buttons and the mouse pad). Also be aware that on many 15 inch laptops they squeeze in a number pad which makes the mouse pad off centered to the left of the screen, this pisses me off trying to use on my lap.

A dual core minimum, and a 15inch screen (or 14 if you want a more portable laptop). Watch out for the Celeron and Sempron processors, they cost slightly less han the dual core Pentiums or Athlon IIs but are not worth the cost saving.

For 700 you can easily get a Core I3 or a lower I5 (for videos/web surfing it won't matter but they are newer, faster and smaller than the Core 2 Duos). 4gb of ram should be your minimum.

I ordered the Asus JC u30jc recently. It's supposed to arrive in a few days. I decided on it because its portable, has great battery life, has very good graphics, and has an hdmi out. Do a search for it and read some reviews. Here is one review- http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5591&review=asus+U30JC+nvidia+optimus . Good luck!

Honestly, Just buy one
I have opinions, and experience. I've had crappy Dell laptops, I've had great laptops. I've had great IBM (Lenovo) laptops, I've had good and bad HP laptops. Toshiba was good back in the day, and they probably still are. For $700.00 you shouldn't be disappointed with anything you buy. Make sure they have a return policy and take it home to play with for a couple weeks. if you like it, keep it. if you don't, go get your $$ back and try again! Reviews are good. Especially customer reviews or trusted "reviewers" like CNet, ZDNet, etc. But I've used the highest rated business laptops, and hated them just because the keyboard didn't "feel" right. But had we kept them, I'm sure they would have browsed the interwebz just fine

Any more, laptops (And all computers for that matter) are no different than a car battery or the brand of pen you like to use. They are all commodity items that do the exact same thing (Yea, some faster than others, but is that really necessary?!?). You do get what you pay for, but why pay for what you don't need? - I'm not going to put Z rated tires on my car, and I don't care if my pen says Bic - Just as long as it draws lines.

SweetSounds said:

Honestly, Just buy one
I'm not going to put Z rated tires on my car, and I don't care if my pen says Bic - Just as long as it draws lines.

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Actually they have w and y rated tires that blow away the z rating.


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Just bought a Toshiba (goin' back to schools for my Master's) went with their cheapest - "Satellite" and it came with Dual-core Intel, 320GB hard drive, 4GB ram, Win 7. Not much software, but for $399 at BestBuy.com, that's plenty of computer for a small price.

wildwest450 said:

Actually they have w and y rated tires that blow away the z rating.


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Touche!!!!

I do not recommend HP. I bought a laptop from them a few years ago. I had to get it repaired multiple times. the screen would not come on. The keyboard would quit working. I probably sent back to get fixed at least six times over two years. What a waste of money that piece of crap was. They refused to reimburse me. So I ended up having to buy another laptop (Sony), and have had no troubles at all.

DON'T BE AFRAID OF DELL OR HP!!!. Laptops in general have many more problems than desktops simply because there is a crapload of technology crammed into a little case which can be easily shaken and dropped. Dell and HP are two of the best brands you can get. Yes, they sometimes have problems, no that doesn't mean all of them are crap.

You need to also look at their customer service quality.

Bret86944 said:

DON'T BE AFRAID OF DELL OR HP!!!. Laptops in general have many more problems than desktops simply because there is a crapload of technology crammed into a little case which can be easily shaken and dropped. Dell and HP are two of the best brands you can get. Yes, they sometimes have problems, no that doesn't mean all of them are crap.

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True about laptops having more issues, but Dell seems just plain crooked. I joined an online group of people who owned the same model of Dell laptop as I did. There were hundreds of us who all had the same defect. We shared the responses we got from Dell and every one of them said that nobody else was reporting any problems like what we were reporting, claiming each of us was the only one. We finally had to form a class action lawsuit to get any results. We won, they lost.

The New York supreme court even agrees that Dell commits fraud: http://hothardware.com/News/New-York-State-Finds-Dell-Guilty-of-Fraud/

AVOID DELL LIKE THE PLAGUE!

Wasn't the D600 was it? That was a crappy laptop. They had a desktop model that had a capacitor issue - We had over 50 motherboards replaced in a year (I was a help desk nerd back then...) - But they were all under 3 year warranty.
I've had good Dell laptops too, though.

I have an HP I bought last Christmas from Best Buy, that I have in a DJ rig. It's been great! And I love my HP work laptop too. I've got an IBM T60 in another rig that is ROCK solid too. Lenovo gets my vote for rockstars of the laptop world. Solid as a rock, and nearly impossible to kill. Dropped a T43 off a table, off the ground, and off a loading dock to the concrete. It stared back at me and said "Is that all you got?!?"

A laptop is a laptop - Keep it under warranty, hope you don't get a lemon - Most people don't - And when it too old/slow/broken, throw it away (eBay), and buy a new one for $300 or $400

I've bought several from the dell outlet. If you know what you're looking for you can usually save a couple bucks or get a slightly better model buying a referb. Same 1yr warranty (3yr also available at an upcharge) as on dell.com. I've had 4 refurbs from the outlet, and have had no issues with any of them. Just my $.02

Check out www.woot.com Good deal for a good laptop. Its a reburb but with the company warranty. $500

I purchase the IT equipment for my firm and have seen the good, bad, and the ugly from most big name brands. Currently I would advise you to take a look at the Dell Vostro 3500. It's nicely built at a great price, and if you can live with a preconfigured (Fast Track) machine they will overnight it to you at no additional cost. I have 18 of these machines in use, and the are a great value.

Thanks everyone for the input. The desicion has been made.

Here it is....

Dell 1558 is the winner!

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dncwbs2&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=laptop-studio-1555

Whatever the warranty period is, expect it to last about three days longer than that.